Read Online Selling Out by Justina Robson - Free Book Online Page B

try,” it said.
    “That’s cheating,” Zal replied angrily. “That was a critical answer for a minor stake, and he gets another go?”
    “Sue me, or offer me a limb,” the doll snapped testily.
    “Are you truly demonic in nature?”
    “Yes,” Zal said coldly.
    The Hoodoo doll got up and began to shimmy with power.
    “And no,” Zal said, feeling a stabbing pain in his right eye.
    It sat down again.
    Malachi raised an eyebrow.
    He won again. “What’s your next single to be?”
    “Disco Inferno,” Zal said without a flicker of irony.
    “Do you not feel that’s selling out?”
    “What am I, chopped liver?” the Hoodoo doll piped. “No extras. Faery eyes are as good as elf eyes any day of the week . . . better for some purposes. They last longer too, before they rot to mush.”
    Zal smiled with half his mouth. It wasn’t a look Malachi really liked.
    “I’m doing it with my sister,” Zal added in an ambiguous tone of voice.
    “I heard that from the brownies,” Malachi said smoothly, “but I didn’t believe it.”
    Zal dealt. Zal won.
    “How many deep ambient faultlines have you found in Faery since the human bomb?” Zal asked.
    The faery’s jet black face darkened in expression and for a moment its fine lines, smooth angles, and handsome features shifted into something at once more animal and strange. Zal had just assumed Malachi would be some kind of cat-spirit with his style and manners, but that was not what he saw in the form that revealed itself for an instant as the faery’s surprise beat his wit. He couldn’t have said what Malachi was, not that every faery wasn’t always faking something up for the sake of it and, as usual, that pissed him off. He listened to Malachi’s answer with a bad humour.
    “There are six,” the faery said.
    “An unstable number,” Zal remarked.
    Malachi gave the slightest nod.
    Zal shrugged, “There are nine in Alfheim, far as I know. Even less stable.”
    The Hoodoo doll attempted to shake its head with disgust and fell over onto its side with a tiny, silent bounce.
    Malachi conjured a vesper sprite with a wave of his fingers and sent it around the room, looking for bugs or telltales. When it returned and vanished he added, “Demonia has eight. And lucky old Earth has a hundred and nine. Mostly minor. So far. We haven’t really finished counting.”
    Zal was privately astonished but he didn’t show it.
    “They grow like weeds here. Spread like lines on a crone’s face come winter, and all the while in our old countries they creep on slow as ice marching, but still, creeping and listening to the whisper from the new land that talks of shredding and decay and the sundering of things to chaos. Ssssss, the web of the worlds undoing like silk slip-sliding and nothing to stop it yet,” the faery said matter-of-factly as he collected the cards, shuffled, and dealt.
    “Fucking indignity,” the Hoodoo doll squeaked, “you don’t understand or respect my powers, you imbeciles!” If it had had a fist it would have shook it.
    Malachi set it upright again and it quivered with unexpressed feelings.
    “It’s nothing personal,” Zal said to it.
    “Save it for someone who cares,” the doll hissed. “I’m drying out.”
    Zal walked across to the suite bar, opened the refrigerator, located ice, cracked it into a tumbler, poured scotch on it, and then set it down on the table. He lifted the doll by its head and put it into the glass.
    The doll snickered and leaned back as though in a jacuzzi. “Take your time, boys.”
    This time Malachi took the cards and shuffled and did not deal. “I’m worried about Lila,” he said. “I think she’s cracking up.”
    “She was fine,” Zal said defensively, thinking the same thing now that Malachi had said it. “Fine.”
    The faery stared at him.
    “Maybe I’ll pay a visit to Demonia.”
    Malachi nodded slowly at him and Zal felt manipulated and grateful.
    “Thish time itsh for your HEADZ!” the doll squeaked